


Revenant

by autumnsolstice9



Series: Justice [8]
Category: Naruto
Genre: F/F, F/M, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 06:00:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16528778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autumnsolstice9/pseuds/autumnsolstice9
Summary: They look at Neji as see how his forehead is covered in wrappings, but his hitai-ate is tied around his neck, just as Hinata wore hers.Naruto and Sakura pretend their hearts don’t ache, untying their hitai-ate and doing the same.Or: Hinata, heroics, and those left behind.





	Revenant

**Author's Note:**

> i feel like this one kinda jumps around, but i mostly wanted to push the plot along. idk.

Naruto watches Hinata jump in front of him, fists filled with chakra, a wave of fire shooting out of her mouth as she tries to incinerate the ten-tails attack. He thinks he must be dreaming. He hadn’t known Hinata was back, and his head feels fuzzy when he looks at her, half-scared that he is in a genjutsu.

He is pulled out of his thoughts when he hears Hinata give a small gasp of pain. Blood is dribbling out of her mouth and a wooden spike is embedded in her side. She lies on the ground, and Naruto can feel the air leave his body.

“Hinata,” he whispers, his mouth becoming familiar with her name again. She had been gone for months, simultaneously becoming taboo to talk about and everything he wanted to discuss. For a moment, he can only stand and stare.

A bloody cough sets his body in motion. “Hinata!” he bellows, rushing towards her. In the distance, he hears screams. There is Sakura’s familiar cry of anguish, Kiba’s loud voice, and Shino and Neji who he had never heard scream before. 

He reaches Hinata’s side, quickly grabbing onto one of her too-cold hands. “Hinata, you gotta stay awake,” he tells her, chest clenching when her eyes flutter towards him. “You gotta, Hinata, you can’t die on me.”

“Naruto,” she gasps out, blood escaping her mouth. “I don’t want to die, Naruto, not yet.” She gives his hand a feeble squeeze, and he can feel tears and snot run down his face.

“Hinata-sama,” Neji says. Naruto isn’t sure when he showed up, too distracted by Hinata. “Please, Hinata-sama, hold on. We need you. Your friends need you. The Hyuuga need you. I need you.” His voice cracks and wavers, and Hinata gives him a bloody smile, her gaze flickering over his face before returning to Naruto.

“Please, Hinata,” Naruto begs, “I need you. The future needs you. We just got you back.”

“I will always come back to you, Naruto-kun,” she rasps out, eyes boring into him even as they glaze over. “Hyuuga eyes see everything but miss so much. See what they cannot.” A shaking hand comes to rest on his cheek, and Naruto wants to scream, when it falls away. “I don’t want to die,” she whimpers, her eyes closing in a flutter. 

He can feel her pulse beneath his fingers, weakening by the minute. Neji, next to him, shakes like a leaf. Hinata’s face slowly grows slack, and Naruto lets out a scream.

He’s not sure if it’s her name he screams, or just a cry of despair. He hears only the blood rushing in his ears and the roar of the kyuubi as his tenuous hold over the nine-tails dissolves. His vision is red, his entire being tense with untethered rage.

The last image he has before the nine-tails takes over is Hinata’s blood soaked skin and a familiar glowing green hand reaching towards her.

Naruto screams, and it is the kyuubi’s voice that comes out.

***

Hinata wakes up to her uncle and mother for the second time in her life. They are once again playing shogi together on a porch, fields of wheat surrounding the little house they are at. The breeze sends the fields swaying like waves, and Hinata aches to run through its endlessness.

In the distance, she thinks she hears screams, loud voices and the sound of battle, but even with her byakugan activated she sees nothing.

She approaches the porch and remembers the last time she was here, after her fight with Pein, and how she was ripped away from her family. “Hinata?” her mother calls out, her voice quivering with some emotion Hinata cannot name. Joy? Fear? Trepidation?

Hinata approaches the porch. “Hello,” she greets, giving both her mother and uncle a bow. 

“How did you get here?” her mother asks. Hinata can feel a dull ache in her side where she was struck and places a palm to her side, surprised when it comes away without blood. Her mother and uncle follow her action, their faces growing grim.

It takes her a moment to notice her mother and uncles bare foreheads. There is no hitai-ate, no seal. A hand reaches forward towards her mother’s unmarked forehead before it returns to her side, fear of being improper settling into her like a familiar coat.

“Your curse marks. They are gone.”

“Branch Hyuuga are allowed to be free in death,” her uncle tells her with a bitter smile.

“Death should not be the price of freedom,” she murmurs, more to herself than anything. She looks at Hizashi and her mother, takes in their stress-lined faces. They were not much older than her when they died, but they had lived a life of servitude, to both the Hyuuga and Konoha.

Her mother reaches a hand towards her, and when Hinata takes it, she notices that it is only partially solid to her. She looks into her mother’s kind eyes, who bled for her clan and for her village. “Is freedom ever really free?” Hinata muses. “The Hyuuga, if they are freed, won’t we just become slaves to the village? Is death really the only sort of freedom for shinobi?”

Her mother holds onto her hand tight. “No one is ever truly free, but we must start somewhere.”

“He was going to seal me.”

“Change is difficult, especially for the Hyuuga. We need new ideas, new rules, new generations who can see what the elders cannot. You have always had better vision than the rest of us,” her mother tells her. It is reminiscent of their conversations from when she was younger.

“I’m going to destroy him. The village will want to put me in chains, but he needs to pay for his crimes, the elders as well. If Konoha throws me in chains, so be it. How could they let this happen? How could they see the Hyuuga suffer and do nothing?” she seethes.

Hizashi’s deep voice draws her gaze. “They all benefit from control. We are shinobi, and they demand loyalty. The Hyuuga have always given it to them, whether we wanted to or not.”

She thinks of the Uchiha, of being forced into a role because they were deemed a threat to the village. The fate of the Hyuuga will likely be similar- no great clan can have that much power without being subdued. The Hokage and the council would never allow it.

_Naruto would,_ her mind whispers, _he would bring peace and justice. He would allow freedom._

Her mother’s hand grows even less solid in her own. “I’m going to destroy him,” she repeats, glancing at how Hizashi’s hand twitches and her mother's shoulders stiffen. “I’m going to throw a coup. I’m going to bring justice to the Hyuuga.”

“You have always been Hinata before you were a Hyuuga,” her mother says, an echo of the past.

“I am just Hinata,” she tells her, “I stopped being Hyuuga long ago. I love you mother, uncle, but now I have to go. The living need me.”

Her uncle spares her a smile and her mother bring her into a tight hug. “As you wish, my dear,” she whispers into her hair. “I am so proud of you.”

She remembers being ripped away from her mother and uncle when she saw them after Pein’s attack. This time, Hinata leaves of her own volition and lets Sakura’s familiar chakra pull her out of the abyss.

***

Sakura is there to bring Hinata back from death but she is not there when she wakes. Instead, she is with Naruto and Kakashi as they drag Sasuke back to where the rest of the Konoha shinobi are waiting.

She can hardly believe that Hinata is alive, that they won the war. Naruto and Sasuke are both missing an arm, but they are alive, and that is more than Sakura could ever ask for. Despite the weariness that sits in their bones, Sakura and Naruto push forward at a pace faster than they know they should. It is unspoken between them, but she knows they both want to see Hinata as soon as they can. Sasuke mentions it once, asking what the rush is considering the war is over, and Sakura still has enough anger in her to want to punch him into the ground for even asking.

“Hinata is back,” she tells him, Naruto nodding his head alongside her.

“Yeah, we want to see Hinata,” Naruto says, as if Sasuke was dumb for even asking. Which, Sakura thinks, he was. Besides specifically wanting to see Hinata, they just won a war. Of course they want to hurry back and see their friends.

When Sasuke straightens his back a little as Hinata’s name, Sakura narrows her eyes. They stop moving, Kakashi warily glancing back at them. “I thought she was a missing-nin?” he asks, and Sakura and Naruto share a glance with each other.

“How did you know that?” she asks.

“I ran into her a couple times.”

Sakura knows she is likely being irrational, but her blood turns to ice. Hinata had a scar running down her face towards her eye that clearly came from a sword, another similar scar on her arm. I ran into her echos through her skull. Sasuke had tried to kill her, tried to kill all of team 7 and wreak havoc on Konoha. What would stop him from hurting Hinata? What would stop him from swinging his sword at her face, aiming to take out an eye? She closes her eyes for a moment, phantom pain shooting through her from Sasuke hurting her in the past, and knows that nothing would stop him from hurting Hinata.

Her blood goes from ice to boiling hot rage. “You,” she snarls, grabbing a fistful of his shirt. “Was it you? Were you the one who attacked her? Scarred her? Are you the reason she almost lost an eye?” She shakes him slightly, Naruto pale beside her and weakly trying to pull her hands off of him while Kakashi watches, ready to step in if things get too physical. “Did you hurt her?”

Sasuke glares down at her. “No,” he grounds out, “I didn’t lay a finger on your precious Hinata.”

She is still full of anger, but she releases him. “You hurt me, Sasuke,” she tells him, pointing a finger in his face. “You hurt me, a lot. You hurt a lot of Konoha, but if you hurt Hinata, I won’t hesitate to kill you.”

He doesn’t look surprised, but then again, she didn’t expect him to. “I won’t hurt her,” he grumbles.

“Why?” Naruto asks, his eyebrows furrowed, face serious. Sakura is pleased to see some wariness on her teammate. Sasuke is their friend, but Hinata is _Hinata_. She’s the first rays of sunlight, the last star to fall asleep.

She’s Hinata, and Sakura feels dizzy just being able to stand near her.

“The Uchiha and Hyuuga are more similar than you think,” Sasuke says, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips. Sakura doesn’t understand what it means, but Kakashi’s hand quivers by his side so she knows it isn’t just a blanket statement. Naruto also looks confused, and she’s sure they will have a talk with their sensei later about what it all means.

Sakura purses her lips and continues marching back home, back to Hinata. 

***

Hinata wakes as if she was just having a dream. Her eyes flutter open, and she lets out a groan when she feels pain wrack her body. She is not whole, not yet, but she is alive and, for the moment, that is more than enough. She is in a medical tent, her body weak, surrounded by Hyuuga guards once again.

She feels handcuffs tying her hands together, and she knows that her clan has captured her. She is, after all, a missing-nin, traitor to her clan. The Hyuuga guards cautiously stare at her, and Hinata feels acutely aware of the blood staining her jacket, her short hair, and her scratched hitai-ate. 

“Is it true?” One of the guards asks, someone Hinata knows by face but not by name. “Is it true that you were going to be sealed?”

She cannot answer, only nod. The guards look at each other out of the corner of their eyes, and Hinata feels tense. Who is she to avoid the seal when so many others have faced it? What makes her better than them?

A man steps forward. “My daughter is turning three soon,” he tells her, face grim, “She will be sealed.”

They all look to her, gauging her reaction. “Then I will stop it,” she croaks out, her voice scratchy and throat dry, “I will not let the Hyuuga live as slaves.”

“What will you do?”

“I will fight my father.” At this gasps erupt throughout the tent. Hyuuga see everything, but they have never seen a coup. “I will fight him, and I will win. And when I do, I will abolish sealing.”

A guard approaches her and places a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Then go,” she tells Hinata, moving to unlock the handcuffs, “Heal yourself. Come back and save your clan, Hinata-hime.”

The rest of the Hyuuga in the room nod, their gazes firm and strong. “Hinata-hime,” one calls out, “may you be swift of foot and sure of heart.”

She still aches with battle injuries and her chest feels like it’s on fire with every breath she takes. “I will return,” she says, voice steady for once in her life, “Tell Neji, tell everyone. Let my father fear the day it happens.”

Hyuuga are meant to be straight-faced, impassive.

Instead, the guards smile.

She weakly makes her way out of the tent, each step like knives twisting in her chest, but she continues on, whispers following her as she makes her way along the row of tents.

_“Is that Hinata?”_

_“She’s back.”_

When she steadfastly makes her way past Hyuuga soldiers, the whispers only grow in volume.

_“She’s returned. She’s come to free us.”_

She flares out what little chakra she has left, making herself a homing beacon for those who wish to find her. Kiba and Shino immediately come to her side, each placing one of her arms over their neck to help her balance. 

“I have to go,” she tells them, voice frail. “I can’t return to Konoha, not like this.”

Kiba opens his mouth to argue, but Shino is the one who speaks first. “Then we will wait with you here, Hinata. We are a team.”

Tears prick her eyes and she buries her face in Kiba’s shoulder. “Hinata, we meant it. Wherever you go, we’ll follow. As long as we aren’t split apart again.” Kiba says, voice rumbling through his chest.

Hinata lifts her head up, ready to accept their offer and escape into the woods, when her gaze catches on Tsunade moving directly towards her. Fear grips her chest, but she stands her ground, ready to face the Hokage’s wrath.

Tsunade stops in front of her. “Brat,” she huffs out, “What are you doing out of bed already? You need more bedrest or else you’re going to ruin Sakura’s fine work.”

Her world feels tilted. “Y-you’re not going to arrest me? Execute me? Drag me back to Konoha?”

The Hokage’s gaze cuts through her. “No. I’m going to let you rest and pretend I never saw you. I’ve heard the rumors. You’ll come back to Konoha eventually, and I’ll deal with you then. For now, you need to rest, come on.”

Tsunade pushes her towards a supply tent, grabbing a scroll and tossing it to Kiba. “This is a thank you for saving Naruto,” she says with a glare. “That scroll will have supplies you need to make camp and some medicine. You may be a hero, Hinata, but you’re still missing-nin and you can’t stay here right now. If you idiots leave with her, you have a month to come back. I can only cover you for so long. Especially you, Aburame. You’re heir to your clan and I do not want to deal with your father if you go missing-nin. And you, Hinata, have a month to get your shit together and come back to Konoha. That should be plenty of time.”

“Thank you, Hokage-sama,” Hinata says, truly grateful.

The Hokage gives her a small smile before briskly leaving the tent. Hinata and her team wait a couple minutes before following and escaping towards the woods. Each step is like fire in her lungs, but she is close to reaching her goal, and her team is by her side.

One month, and she will be back in Konoha.

***

Naruto and Sakura do not cry when they learn that Hinata is somehow gone again. “It was too dangerous for her here,” Neji tells them as they sit by a fire. “She may be a hero, but she’s missing-nin. The Hyuuga would have dragged her back to Konoha and put her on trial.”

They both know it’s true, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. They look at Neji as see how his forehead is covered in wrappings, but his hitai-ate is tied around his neck, just as Hinata wore hers.

Naruto and Sakura pretend their hearts don’t ache, untying their hitai-ate and doing the same.

**Author's Note:**

> neji cant die i refuse to let that happen


End file.
